What Is SEO And Why Is It Important?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is essentially a methodology used to increase the amount of visitors to a specific website. By achieving a higher “ranking” your placement in the list of similar websites is higher on the ”results” page of a search engine.

Search engines are programs like Google, Bing and Yahoo! that rank documents a website by  matching  keywords and then ranking them by the number of  “hits” or “visits”, to that site by users searching for related documents and information on the World Wide Web.

Since the ranking is based on the number of hits or visits to a website, it’s essentially a “beauty contest” – the “most appealing” website is the websites with the most search hits and wins first place – that is, they appear on the first “page” of the search result.  In television terms, those websites appear on prime time, all the others are relegated to the “less popular” and “less watched” time frame. Obviously, you want your website to show up on “prime time”;  that is,  the first page of the search engine results. That’s where SEO comes in.

Online videos are now a major factor in SEO strategies and you want to be on “prime time”, not buried further down the list. Short video content has consistently added to the number of “hits” from web search users. YouTube is now the second largest search engine, and a well produced video SEO will generate far better returns than purely text sites. Like TV, it’s visual medium.

A majority of marketers now use YouTube for video sharing. Sites also include Vimeo, Daily Motion and Viddler are used for distributing business videos; and for “social video” content Vine and Instagram can create and share video communications as well.